PRADA FW26

At this year’s Milan Fashion Week, Prada is going lean and mean. No, not nauseatingly Caucasian, like Dolce and Gabbana. No, not vaguely derivative like Ralph Lauren. Instead Prada’s joint creative directors, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a FW26 collection built around a slender silhouette that had the fashion world buzzing!  

Both Prada and Simons seemed keen to make a statement with this collection, though what that statement is remains very much up in the air. Both co-directors appeared to understand how difficult it is for a luxury house to say anything truly meaningful. Ultimately, any commentary from the world of high fashion is better than nothing, but Prada’s semiotics (though visually interesting) felt occasionally one-note, or otherwise thematically dull.

By now, it’s clear that attempts from the fashion world to include and incorporate plus-sized silhouettes has gone wholly out the window. True to this sad reality, Prada’s show was slim and unavoidably lean. In what many speculate was a possible comment on the normalization of Ozempic, most outerwear adhered to a strictly form-fitting design. Even the dutifully thin models, walked with their hands jammed in their pockets, which only attenuated the looks even further.

Trenchcoats added a bit more volume to the collection, making for a creative highlight in the show. On a number of otherwise standard trenches, the upper half of the coat harshly split into a colorful shrug, bisecting the garment in a singular, clean line. These were fresh, eye-catching, and the most overt nod to Raf Simon’s prior work at Calvin Klein. 

While every model kept their hands stuffed deep in pockets, Prada’s unkempt french cuffs still caught some looks. Why? Well aside from fairly stellar cufflinks, it might have been the dirt, grease, and even mold spores that decorated many of the sleeves. We can chalk this up to Prada and Simons’ vaguely attempting to say something about “rolling up one’s sleeves,” or perhaps, insinuating that their clientele ought to actually wear the clothing in the real world. Whether or not some pre-stained cuffs will get through to the ultra-rich is neither here nor there. 

There was also an ongoing plethora of hats— nearly all of them, floppy variations on 1920s classics such as the newsboy cap, cloche hat, and fedora. The show itself was titled “Before and Next” and in their brief statement, Prada and Simons explained they were pushing “Evolution Without Erasure.” Despite antiquated silhouettes, the hats were impeccably styled, albeit tinged with what has become a recent Simons’ staple: wrinkles. Wrinkled hats and crumpled sleeves might seem like obvious attempts at making the clothing feel “lived in” but this pales in comparison to the hats which were attached to models’ backs, literally flattened into 2D.

One picky note: The penultimate look of the collection featured a drooping sun hat that looked uncannily similar to the avant tricorns of Jonathan Anderson’s Dior SS26 show. It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but the similarity does highlight a considerable gap in execution from one designer to another. 

So now it’s on to Paris! We’ll see what Jonathan Anderson has in store for us, and whether Demna finally blows the doors off of the house of Gucci. But for now, Prada and Simons have set their standard in Milan, and it’s a pretty slim one.